Ben Affleck: I Was the Person to Loathe

Ben Affleck has lately been quite vocal about the "insane" Bennifer years, even telling GQ magazine that when he was seeing Jennifer Lopez the media treatment he received seemed worse than what the press was saying about convicted killer Scott Peterson at the time.

"I was the guy. I was the designated person to loathe," he recalls. "What was that guy's name who killed his wife and dumped her off the side of a boat? Peterson. I remember thinking he actually gets slightly better treatment than I do in the press. At least they had to say 'alleged killer.'"

Affleck and Lopez broke off their engagement days before their wedding, leading to reports that the actor was unfaithful. Years later, Affleck, who is now married and has three kids with Jennifer Garner, seems to be taking some responsibility for all the bad press. "The amount of venom—I must have touched some specific little place in the consciousness," he says. "I don't believe I didn't deserve any negative judgment for anything, but it was just way out of whack."

The Argo actor, 40, says his solution to this tumultuous time was just to escape. "I think I just ran away," he tells GQ. "You can only handle so much. I moved for a while to this place in Georgia that I have, was able to get away, by and large, from stuff. Come up with a plan for how to do something with my life that doesn't put me in the cross-hairs of this sort of thing."

He adds that the Bennifer era "was really bad for me in all kinds of different ways, particularly in terms of my emotional life, my sense of self."